Recent Works

Painting with Light

Candlestar proudly presented Painting with Light, its fourth exhibition developed in partnership with the luxury five-star hotel Hyatt Regency London – The Churchill. Painting with Light was an exploration of the boundaries between photography and painting, through the work of five artists. The work of Tom Hunter, Brian Griffin, Susan Derges, Marcus Doyle and Yvonne de Rosa was included in the exhibition.

Tom Hunter was the first artist to have a show of his photography at the National Gallery. His images often directly reference and borrow compositions from the works of the ‘Old Masters’. As Hunter says, if these artists had been alive today they would probably have been photographers. Similarly the work of Brian Griffin, one of the world’s leading portrait photographers, has been compared to the work of the Dutch Masters and the American painter Edward Hopper, as well as contemporary film-makers such as David Lynch. Griffin’s portraiture visibly embraces Renaissance painting in terms of light and pose. Susan Derges’ approach, however, is very different. Her camera-less works are the result of a direct relationship between natural light and the recording medium, resulting in images that are effectively painted by the light itself. Marcus Doyle’s night scenes, in contrast evoke qualities of traditional landscape painting, with extravagant, almost artificial-seeming, colours. The same ethereal quality of light in his images can also be found in Yvonne de Rosa’s work, where it lends her still life scenes a certain incandescence.